Flying Soviet fighters back when; (updated, pics added)

Bleep, what a mess.
Two things that particularly grabbed me: the mechanics("We had 210 maintainers," Manclark recalled. "They were dedicated, just unbelievable, tech sergeants and master sergeants.) and this on flares:
We had the Soviet flares – they were dirty, and none of them looked the same – and the AIM-9P said 'I love that flare'.

"Why’d that happen? We had designed it to reject American flares. The Soviet flares had different burn time, intensity and separation. The same way, every time we tried to build a SAM simulator, when we got the real thing it wasn’t the same.
I realize there were problems getting Soviet stuff to test, but it seems like "We need to find out what the enemy flares burn like before we make this missile operational" would be a pretty basic thing.


Pumice- LOTS of pumice- apparently from a underwater volcano.


So if you own a AR or AK or similar, you wasted money on something no good for hunting, no good for self-defense, only good for domestic, homegrown terrorism. Right. Not the politicians with badges insisting the commoners can't be trusted with such, 'don't need them', etc.


Yeek; not a nice comparison at all, is it?


Also pointed to by Tam, a slight problem with equipment: those string-locking gadgets on a lot of jackets. Another incident here, noted in the comments.
Also in the comments, a guy warns about some shirts having a 'pocket' that can cause problems. I know about that; I've got a couple of shirts I've used for cover that have the problem: where the material folds back along the front, it's sewn at the bottom but not above there, and I've had the muzzle catch in that pocket during dry-fire practice. I'll take pictures later and add them to this, short on time right now.
Update: here's the inside front of that shirt:
and here's what happened a couple of times during dry-fire draw & fire practice:
This was with a IWB holster, but could be a problem with any; the shirt's light enough that it would fall back down and, sometimes, the muzzle could go into that pocket. Distracting, at the least.